By malicious intention or ruinous happenstance, the storm had hidden behind the mountains.

It had crept overhead by gradual measure, at first no greater than the perpetual snowfall that had followed them from the city, growing slowly into a raging omen that could not be ignored, though Gregor had still missed it. Not for lack of notice – he noticed that it was snowing quite heavily and that the wind was blowing mean – but for uncharacteristic complacency. Previously, the storms had always spat rain. It was only after the explosives had rolled almost to his feet that Gregor realised snow could storm too.

Fortunately, he had been awake, and aware enough to telekinetically fling the sticks through the glass of a cabinside window. Through this new breach, great anvils of frost could be heard rumbling overhead, roaring loudly as if knowing that they needn’t hide any longer and sending down their ill winds to blow bitingly into wound of the carriage.

Mildred was very quickly also awake, and was sitting straight up in her makeshift bench-bed with a pistol in hand even before the distant boom echoed off the walls of the valley that the train was rumbling through. Idly, Gregor wondered if there was enough snow for an avalanche.

When he nodded Mildred toward a door, she didn’t even hesitate before firing through it. Half-crouched, she shuffled over to Gregor, her wide eyes asking very loudly, ‘What the fuck?’ and struggling to see much of anything in the dark. She’d changed, definitely. There had grown a stark difference between the Mildred of now and the Mildred of the journey’s beginning. It was an important change, and it deserved consideration, but Gregor didn’t have the attention to spare. New blasting sticks had come tumbling through the doors, now burning much shorter fuses.

Gregor threw them back, of course. Then came twin booms, and the doors flew inward off their hinges. Out of the corner of his eye, Gregor noted debris streaming past the windows in the dark of the snow-choked night.

How was he to handle this? There were enemies in all of the directions that it was possible for enemies to be, and he had fragile Mildred to think about. Bullets and bombs were not risks she could manage on her own, so he needed to stay with her, but he also needed to go and kill everyone who opposed him, and he couldn’t really bring her along to do that, because that would be even more dangerous.

Gregor arrived at the solution almost immediately – he just needed to turn the two directions of danger into one. Thankfully, he was on a train.

The finger appeared before him, warping space uncomfortably – it was an equivalent discomfort to being drunk and trying to roll your eyes into the back of your skull – and he teleported to the now-empty doorway at the rear of the cabin, maintaining the strongest ward he could manage.

In the carriage following his, he saw the broadly displaced gore of perhaps three men, with others likely having fallen through the new holes in the walls and floor of the compartment. Behind this were a few blast-dazed mean-lookers, dressed in casual clothes but with bandoleers of bullets and belt-dangling throat-cutters. Most held pistols, and some were pointed at him. Further behind, more men were piling in from the connected carriage.

Paying the guns no mind, Gregor dashed his finger against the linking mechanism, and it exploded with the scream of unhappy metal. He didn’t linger to watch the rear of the train drift away, instead, he flashed back to Mildred, feeling that he’d left her alone for far too long already.

While he’d been securing their rear, she had been occupied in flinging lead through the open aperture at their front, hoping to dissuade the lobbing of any more explosives.

This was mostly unnecessary, because the surviving men on that side were now wary that anything they threw was likely to come straight back at them, but she clipped a few poor dazed fools and made the others scurry for their own guns to return fire. At the same time, reinforcements were piling into the hostile car from further up the train

With these additional enemies, Mildred’s deterrence was soon to be drowned out, and so she found herself telekinetically flattened against the wall of the carriage next to Gregor, out of sight thanks to the narrow view that the doorway provided her assailants.

The finger was gone, and he had a fireball brewing above his stump.

“Wait here moment,” he said.

She barely let out an ‘Um, alright,’ before Gregor flashed away, then came straight back. She felt him press her harder into the wall. Everything went silent, and she noticed the thin shimmer of some kind of magical barrier covering the both of them. After no longer than a second, the whole train gave such a horrible jolt the she though it had leapt off the tracks, and a great spume of smoke carried the fragmentary interior parts of a passenger carriage past her face. Passengers included.

Within the alien silence of the barrier, Gregor conversationally remarked that, “Generally, it is a poor idea to fight fire with explosives.”

The barrier fell away, and the pair cautiously adventured into the destruction to see the odd sights.

Dark night flecked with white whistled in through the now-open windows, clearing smoke but limiting vision to a squint and pulling wildly at their clothes. There were considerable holes in the floor according to the presumable positions of the unused blasting sticks, and the exposed metal of the walls and ceiling had bowed out to the point of breaching in the middle of the car.

The distended room now had a visible slouch, hinting toward the possibility of collapse. Though, despite all the trauma, it was still attached to the rest of the train, which was nice.

Strewn about were pieces of people, unrecognisable, but probably the right people. It was intensely disgusting, and Mildred fought the urge to vomit, which was an urge she was strangely glad to still possess.

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Allowing no time for calm, the distant door of the forward-adjoining passenger car clamoured open, revealing more gunmen of an obviously violent disposition, moving toward them between rows of seating which suggested a much cheaper kind of ticket.

Gregor commanded Mildred with a hoarse “Go back,” and limped forward, flinging shards of ice and telekinetically hurling any un-tied-down thing that might be heavy enough for a weapon. The front-most man’s brain sprouted a icicle and he toppled, almost tripping the others, but the brute behind him was clever in violence grabbed the corpse to hold up as a shield, pressing still forward toward Mildred and Gregor and firing blindly under the dead fellow’s armpit.

Gregor couldn’t teleport into their midst and get to work, not with fragile Mildred behind him. She’d be open and vulnerable. So he advanced slowly and manually and let a few bullets strike his wards while she slunk off to secret herself away in their carriage, where she’d be safe and he wouldn’t need to worry.

Four hammer-blows rocked his mind before he heard her shouted go-ahead over the sucking wind and cacophonous gunfire, and then he was amongst the mercenaries, who, if surprised that a wizard would enter into a melee, made no sign and faltered very little. There was one to his rear and three in front and they gave him their attention just as readily as before.

He swung his staff magically in a whirl, aiming to club them all. Two of the front three ducked, with the third earning a pulverised chin and a sharply broken neck for his inaction, whilst the one behind turned to shoot, dropping his corpse-shield and catching the enchanted staff with the joint his shoulder. His meat turned to paste.

Appropriating the two dropped guns, Gregor executed point-blank one of the men who’d ducked, but missed the other, who rolled away into some nearby under-seat stowage and began firing up blindly through the upholstery at where he assumed the wizard might be. One bullet bounced off his wards, and Gregor responded in kind. The shots stopped.

As he used the bottom of his staff to pop the skull of the shoulder-struck man, the door to the next carriage opened, revealing the barrel of a rather gigantic gun which seemed to be bolted to the floor of the train.

The operator turned a hand-crank, levelling the beast, and sighted Gregor in the instant that Gregor sighted him. Mildred was behind, so he couldn’t simply teleport to safety and let the shot past.

With a great telekinetic strain, the wizard fought against the mechanism’s gearing to yank the barrel upwards. It fired a great lump of a shell into the ceiling, brightening the night with a flash and briefly dimming the roar of wind and thunder to a white-hot ring.

Gregor teleported behind the weapon, and began again his work on the men he found. The gun had two operators and he shot them both, opting to use scavenged firearms to preserve his magical endurance, finding that spells beyond telekinesis were unnecessary here. Bullets were effort-efficient.

This time, the door to the next carriage was already open, and from it spewed more foes.

The train was full of them.

There had evidently been a few regular passengers, but all were dead, with slit throats or muffled mouths and many stab wounds – all silently exterminated to prevent any ruckus which might serve as warning to the wizard, and Gregor saw some kind of steward slumped into a nearby seat, perhaps unfortunate enough to have asked one of these men to produce his ticket.

His wards were tired now, and a bullet that bore some weak kind of enchantment punched through to take a bite from his gimp leg. Another grazed the flesh of his good arm.

Teleporting at first behind this new group to make them turn, then teleporting back again, he lobbed a fireball and hoped that they carried no explosives. It was weak, and served more to ignite than to mangle.

The flame clothed them, finding a home in their hair and all the fabric they wore. It sent them all flailing in panic, allowing Gregor to limp slowly forward to shoot them one by one.

Distantly, after he’d executed the last and was starting toward the next carriage, whose occupants seemed to be wisely laying in wait, Gregor felt something. There was a faint magical eminence far ahead of the train, approaching with speed. He halted, deciding to wait for whatever may come.

Though the train maintained its pace, the thing’s speed of approach slowed as it drew nearer, indicating that it must also be moving quite fast, perhaps trying to match pace with the locomotive. Eventually, when he felt it drawling alongside the train, he heard the faint crack of teleportation, and then the presence was firmly in front of him.

They’d picked up a passenger, perhaps three cars ahead.

Wasting no time, Gregor advanced. He materialised in the next carriage and began his work, like a tireless machine for the harvesting of souls. Crop fell before his scythe and became more chaff in his trail. One man sought to stab the wizard, and found his own knife drawing a neat circle around his neck. Another grabbed the blood-soaked staff with both hands as it whipped toward the head of his friend and lost an arm in trade, and thereafter lost everything else as well.

Harvest complete, Gregor moved on, and found in the next car that the new passenger had decided to meet him in the middle.

It was a well-known warlock named Prospero, famous enough and disliked enough that Gregor knew him by sight. Flanking him was a collared hellhound the color of flaming char, standing at two-thirds his height with ember eyes and casting no shadow, and in front and behind him were yet more mercenaries. Gregor could hear the clamour of the locomotive close ahead.

“Where is your ticket?” Prospero asked.

Gregor didn’t have a ticket, but he did have a rather interesting finger, which he produced in hopes of using it as a substitute. He blinked, and the hound was upon him, somehow passing its maw through his wards to clamp teeth on the calf of his bad leg. He felt the fangs strike bone before the finger met the back of the demon dog’s head, exploding it violently into hard shards of not-flesh which bypassed his wards and left jagged cuts in his robe and skin.

Maddened at the loss of such a valuable slave, Prospero produced a large shotgun from within his own robes, and let loose two alchemical shells of insidious content which glowed incandescent as they streaked through the air.

Half of these pellets struck the corpse of the hellhound, and the other half struck Gregor’s wards, collapsing them. A few projectiles still carried energy enough to penetrate flesh, and they burrowed shallow through his robe to cause significant burning agony.

It was all he could manage to teleport up and away to the roof of the train.

Freezing winds stung his face and blinded him with snow, but that was fine, for he had left the finger behind. Blindly, he telekinetically dragged it around the interior of the carriage, hearing dimly the crunch and splat and the screaming he expected. Then, when all went silent, he punched a large hole into the metal of the roof with his staff and sent in a fireball, just to be sure.

There was a bang and a thump as the windows blew outward, but all remained silent within.

Overhead, the boil and roil of thunder settled to a whisper.